“Books we want to have young people read should not be recommended to them but praised in their presence. Afterwards they will find them themselves.” — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, notebook, 1775-1779

a man who is so dull
that he can learn only by personal experience
is too dull to learn
anything important by experience.

— Don Marquis, ‘archy on this and that’, Archy Does His Part, 1935

This logic puzzle is the numerical equivalent of a crossword. Each white cell in the diagram is to be filled with a digit from the range 1-9. The sum of each string of digits must match the “clue” given in the diagram. For example, the clue 29 above means that the four digits to its right must sum to that total. No digit may be duplicated within any entry. Can you complete the diagram?

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The programming language efghij is literally object-oriented — its logic is expressed by arranging ordinary items in meaningful tableaus:

In this example, the tray and the cutting board constitute code blocks. The oblong plate, however, has a clothes peg on it, which expresses a for loop. The fork is a local variable. The fork variable is initialized to 1 within the for loop’s initial-value expression. The sauce with the rubber band indicates that the number of iterations is equal to the function’s argument. The stuff on the cutting board is the loop body. Using a stapler, the fork is multiplied by the sauce and the result assigned to the fork using a drinking glass. A hammer decrements the sauce, which demonstrates that the function’s parameter can be used as a local variable too. Finally, the toilet roll indicates that the return value is the final value of the fork.

That produces a factorial. The program below outputs the phrase “Hello, world!” — it’s just a pillow bearing a piece of paper on which those words are written.

(a) At least two of these statements, apart from this one, are true.
(b) At least two of these statements, apart from this one, are false.
(c) At least one of these statements is false.
(d) x of these statements are true.

Given that, if you knew the value of x, you could determine uniquely which statements are true and which are false, determine the value of x.

Can I liquor my stand? Why, yes, like hell!
I care not how many a tossed I’ve pot,
I shall stralk quite weight and not yutter an ell,
My feech will not spalter the least little jot:
If you knownly had own! — well, I gave him a dot,
And I said to him, ‘Sergeant, I’ll come like a lamb —
The floor it seems like a storm in a yacht,
But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.”

For example, to prove it I’ll tale you a tell —
I once knew a fellow named Apricot —
I’m sorry, I just chair over a fell —
A trifle — this chap, on a very day hot —
If I hadn’t consumed that last whisky of tot! —
As I said now, this fellow, called Abraham —
Ah? One more? Since it’s you! Just a do me will spot —
But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.

Envoi

So, Prince, you suggest I’ve bolted my shot?
Well, like what you say, and soul your damn!
I’m an upple litset by the talk you rot —
But I’m not so think as you drunk I am.

— J.C. Squire

Pnin’s birthday … fell on February 3, by the Julian calendar into which he had been born in St. Petersburg in 1898. He never celebrated it nowadays, partly because, after his departure from Russia, it sidled by in a Gregorian disguise (thirteen — no, twelve days late), and partly because during the academic year he existed mainly on a motuweth frisas basis.

This describes the novelist’s own confusing situation. He’d been born in Saint Petersburg on April 10, 1899, in the Julian calendar, which corresponds to April 22, 1899, in the Gregorian. (Russia didn’t adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1918.) The turn of the century added a further wrinkle: The offset between the two calendars increased from 12 to 13 days for dates occurring after February 1900. Properly this had no effect on earlier dates, so Nabokov’s birthday should always have been reckoned April 22, but some confused writers began to give it as April 23, and eventually that’s when he began to celebrate it himself — as he told interviewers, it meant he now shared a birthday with both William Shakespeare and Shirley Temple.

(Though he nowhere explains it, “motuweth frisas” refers to the days of the week, the most familiar rhythm of an academic’s life.)

• begonia: after Michel Bégon, a former governor of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti)
• camellia: after Jesuit botanist Georg Joseph Kamel
• dahlia: after Anders Dahl, a student of Carl Linnaeus
• forsythia: after Scottish botanist William Forsyth
• fuchsia: after German botanist Leonhart Fuchs
• gardenia: after Scottish naturalist Alexander Garden
• magnolia: after French botanist Pierre Magnol
• poinsettia: after Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first U.S. minister to Mexico, who is credited with bringing the flower to the United States
• wisteria: after American physician Caspar Wistar
• zinnia: after German botanist Johann Gottfried Zinn

The ackee fruit of Jamaica is named Blighia sapida after William Bligh, who discovered it in his travels after the mutiny on HMS Bounty.

(Via Maxwell W. Nurnberg, Wonders in Words, 1968.)

“Red-faced and embarrassed, Clough was nevertheless ribald enough to giggle delightedly over the appallingly ludicrous way in which he had introduced such unseemliness into ‘all the drawing rooms and boudoirs (of course) of all the world,'” notes author Robindra Kumar Biswas.

On republishing the poem, Clough changed the name to the appropriately meaningless Tober-na-Vuolich.

   VENUS
    MARS
  SATURN
+ URANUS
--------
 NEPTUNE

If each letter consistently represents a particular digit, what equation does this expression encipher?

   20163
    4593
  358691
+ 695163
--------
 1078610